Are you wondering who is Terry Ramsden? He is a gambler and investor from England who focuses on horse racing and the Japanese stock market.
Ramsden was born in Enfield, England, to a GPO Telephones engineer father. He started working as an insurance clerk and quickly realized that working for someone else would never provide him with the wealth he desired. He became self-employed in 1971 at the age of 19 and earned £25,000 in his first month.
Who is Terry Ramsden Actually?
Ramsden made his first money by betting on horse races for low stakes. He bought Glen International, an Edinburgh-based firm, in 1984. He narrowed the company’s focus to horse racing.
He had a small annual turnover of £18,000 in his first year, but three years later it had grown to £3.5 billion. He ascended to the position of 57th richest man in the United Kingdom. He is said to have had a net worth of around £150 million at one point.
Ramsden lost vast sums of money in 1988, following the 1987 stock market crash and the subsequent bursting of the Japanese asset price bubble, including £57 to £58 million on racetrack gambling and capital losses of nearly £100 million.
He was arrested and imprisoned for six months in Los Angeles in 1991 while awaiting extradition to the United Kingdom for fraud. He witnessed gang violence in prison.
Terry Ramsden Broke His Bond
Yes, he is known as the richest gambler in the world. Terry Ramsden was the quintessential self-made Essex man of the Thatcherite era during his heyday in the 1980s.
Ramsden, who stood 5’4″ tall and sported the popular mullet hairstyle at the time, once declared, in a distinctive cockney tone, “I’m a stockbroker from Enfield.” I have long hair and enjoy a wager.’
For some time, Ramsden was said to have been backing Brunico in a doubles with Cheltenham Gold Cup winner Dawn Run.
Soon after, Ramsden purchased Mr. Snugfit, who had finished second in the 1985 Grand National, and placed a £50,000 each-way bet on him for the 1986 renewal at 8/1.
Mr. Snugfit was virtually single-handedly sent out as a 13/2 favorite for the National; the nine-year-old finished a distant fourth, but Ramsden still won £150,000 on the placing half of his bet.
‘The truth is I had half a million quid each way, quote, unquote,’ Ramsden claimed many years later. Everything else you hear is nonsense.’
More high-profile victories followed, including Not So Silly in the Ayr Gold Cup in 1987, but his ‘biggest single losing bet’ – £1 million on another of his horses, Below Zero – and the unexpected stock market crash, dubbed ‘Black Monday,’ in October of that year effectively put the Ramsden fortunes to rest.
When Glen International went bankrupt in 1988, Ramsden was indebted to Ladbrokes to the tune of £2 million. The Jockey Club ‘warned him off’ for not paying the debt, effectively ending his interest in racehorse ownership.
Ramsden was arrested in Los Angeles three years later, at the request of the Serious Fraud Office, and imprisoned for six months pending extradition to the United Kingdom. When he returned to the UK in 1992, he was declared bankrupt, owing £100 million in debt.
After pleading guilty to recklessly inducing new investment in Glen International the following year, he received a two-year suspended sentence, but was prosecuted again in 1997 at the Old Bailey for failing to disclose assets worth